New album tour brings The Marmozets to Brighton

The Marmozets – a band made up of two sets of siblings – play Brighton on the back of the release of their new album.

Knowing What You Know Now came out on January 26; the band headline Concorde 2 on February 4.

The band is a meeting of the MacIntyres (vocalist Becca, rhythm guitarist Sam and drummer Josh) and the Bottomleys (lead guitarist Jack and bassist Will).

Sam said: “It started off because I went to school with Jack. We both had a big passion and love for music and started off jamming together. I used to go round to his house and listen to music and started playing music together, and it just began from there really.”

The fact that brothers and sister joined in as well makes it all so much easier in many ways, Sam says: “Instead of getting organised with five different people, it is just two different families. We are all from Yorkshire, from near Bradford, and we have been together as a band for about ten years. We started off doing fairly-local stuff and then it just builds up from there. You start playing to more people and you start travelling a bit more, and you end up getting noticed a bit more. It is like climbing a ladder. We are getting there. We have played some amazing places. We get to play music around the world.

“Japan was probably the best. Japan was pretty nuts. It was just amazing, the festival that we played there. We were very well looked after. We are all fairly friendly people and like to get on with as many people as we can, and being over there, it was really nice to be somewhere everybody is good to each other.”

The new album is their second album, and the title, Knowing What You Know Now isn’t from one of the tracks; it’s more of a statement, as Sam explains.

“With music and when you are writing an album, you can never really judge what is going to happen. You never know where music is going to take you, and so you spend a lot of time worrying. You never know where you are going to be next year, but then when you get there, you know that it is fine and you think that you needn’t have worried so much, so that’s what it’s about. You are just thinking ‘if only we had known what we know now.’ It’s just a way of saying ‘Don’t worry so much’ really.”

The band has released a number of EPs, but this is only album number two in ten years: “It is not a cheap thing to do at all to record and release an album. It costs thousands. But now things are different. When I was a teenager, you just didn’t have the facilities that we have now that we can use to record an album in terms of using your laptop..”

Partly the long delay since the last album has also been about waiting for Becca to recover. “My sister had a really bad injury. She had to have two knee operations which was a massive setback for us. She had to recover. She has always had really, really bad knees. It was just one of those things. It was at Leeds or Reading in 2014 or 2015, I can’t remember, and we were playing and then we were walking to the press area, and someone decided to rugby-tackle her to the ground, just a play fight, and her knee ended up going out of place.

“She is fine now, and as soon as we solved all of her problems we got back into the studio and got back to recording.”